Danny,
: I'm suggesting that if the processes of the web (web services, agents,
: inference engines, whatever) are described in the same language as the data
: resources (pages, feeds etc) then these can be reasoned about in exactly the
: same way. The Babel of agents and engines is reduced, directory services are
: simplified, advertising and discovery services (Jini etc) become more
: interoperable. This strikes me as a way of making life a lot easier all
: round.
At the www9 open lunch hosted by Tim Berners Lee, he wanted people to pipe up
about the future of the semantic web or what it might mean to have one. I said
that one day I'd to be able to find a person to answer my questions the way I
can find a document to answer them today. The person who took the mike from me
cracked that he didn't have a problem finding people today. Right. And there's a
world market for say, about 5 computers.
On the way back from that conference I wondered what it would be like to be able
to ask a question of a more constrained system than the entire web; say a
conference like www9, where you know there's a concentration of smart people.
Attendees could supply a description of what they're good at. Code with some
smarts could infer what people are good at from what they're speaking about or
what wg they're on. You'd go to the web site, type in a question. The response
could be a hit list of people (then you'd have to make them an offer they can't
refuse), or the question is directed in their inbox for consideration a la
content based routing. If you had something like Erdos numbers, people with low
numbers could reject questions from people who are too "far away", so they don't
get inundated.
But there is no reason why you couldn't include mailing lists, news groups,
community driven websites, open source projects, faqs, ... as resources to be
asked questions. The benefit being you wouldn't have to waste a lot of time
figuring out which ones you should ask first and then reading the faq in case
your questions' being asked 10 times a week. And that does take some time.
There are a few expert sites like this, but they're not exactly open and
restricted to people.
I guess I'm saying that mobile questions might be useful some day.
regards,
Bill de hÃra